Professional-strength PDF software is a must-have for lawyers, and the gold standard for PDF software has always been Adobe Acrobat Pro. But at Acrobat Pro’s current retail price of $449, many lawyers, especially in smaller firms, opt for more budget-friendly alternatives, such as CutePDF Professional, which I reviewed here several years ago.

Now there is another choice. Today, Nuance Communications — maker of the Dragon speech recognition software — is launching Nuance Power PDF Advanced, a full-featured professional PDF program, with all the features businesses — including lawyers — would expect in such a program. Notably, Nuance has set the price of Power PDF at $149.99 — a third the cost of Acrobat Pro — with volume discounts available. (A 30-day free trial is available.) . . . .

It will be interesting to see legal writing professors’ take on this. Please note that this App only works on iPads. -CCE

A third-year student at The University of Michigan Law School has created an iPad app, BriefCase, that automates the creation of case briefs.

The student, David Lutz, found it cumbersome to have to print out PDFs of cases, annotate them, and then type all the annotated information into a brief. The app lets you do all that on an iPad. (There are no iPhone or Android versions.) . . . .

Over the last two years, LexisNexis has been ramping up its library of ebooks, with a growing list of titles for both practitioners and law students. Law students, in particular, are key consumers of ebooks, Lexis says, citing statistics that say six in 10 college students prefer digital books over print. One of the advantages of an ebook over print is the ability to link interactive features that augment and enhance the core text.

That is what Lexis is aiming to do with Evidence Challenge, its new interactive role-playing game designed to help second- and third-year law students test their knowledge of evidence law. . . .

If you’re at all like me, your life is dispersed across multiple cloud platforms. I have documents on Drive, Dropbox and Box. I have notes in Evernote. I have photos on Instagram, Picasa and Flickr. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could access all these cloud services through a single interface and a single login?

Well, you can. In fact, there are a number of applications that let you do this. Some are paid and some are free. I have been trying two of the free services, Jolidrive and CloudKafe.